The American legal system, as well as some other legal systems around the world, relies heavily on written judicial opinions, the written pronouncements of judges, to articulate or interpret the laws governing resolution of disputes. Each judicial opinion is not only important to resolving a particular legal dispute, but also to resolving similar disputes, or cases, in the future. Because of this, judges and lawyers within our legal system are continually researching an ever-expanding body of past opinions, or case law, for the ones most relevant to resolution of disputes. Moreover, judges and lawyers are also regularly researching an expanding body of federal, state, and city-level statutes that articulate specific laws as well as scholarly law review articles that expand on finer legal or philosophical nuances regarding particular legal issues.
To facilitate these searches Thomson Reuters/West, a division of Thomson Reuters, collects judicial opinions from courts across the United States, and makes them available electronically through its Westlaw™ legal research system. Users access the judicial opinions, for example, by submitting keyword or natural language queries for execution against a jurisdictional database of judicial opinions or case law. The Westlaw system also provides access to legal statutes and secondary legal content, such as legal encyclopedia articles and other scholarly material, that are relevant to specific queries.
A typical user search begins with the user entering and submitting a query: a short sequence of words that ideally defines a specific topic of interest to the user. If the query is well formulated or unambiguous, the system returns a set of ranked legal documents that includes the information the user desires within its higher ranks. On the other hand, if the query is ambiguous, the system is vulnerable to returning a set of documents that are not convergent on the specific information needs of the user. Indeed, within the legal domain, the returned documents may span several unrelated areas of the law and thus leave the user with a significant task of manually sifting through many irrelevant results.
Although it is known to alert or warn a user that a given query may yield search results having a large number of documents, for example more than a 1000, there is no indication in this warning that the query itself is ambiguous in terms of the diversity of topics that the search results may cover. Moreover, if the query is indeed ambiguous, the search itself is likely to be an inefficient use of both computing resources and professional labor.
Accordingly, the present inventor recognized a need for better ways of handling the problem of ambiguous queries.